Peter Kline (Poetry) | San Francisco, CA

Peter Kline teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House, James Merrill House, Artsmith Orcas Island, Marble House Project, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation, as well as First Prize in the 2015 River Styx International Poetry Contest and the 2010 Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, and the 2015 Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure. He directs the San Francisco literary series Bazaar Writers Salon and is a founding member of the poetry/music collective Nonstop Beautiful Ladies. His first collection of poetry, Deviants, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2013.

Books

Blurbs, Press & Reviews

With craft, dark wit and an edgy honesty in every line, these poems unsettle our familiar world. There are no comfortable places left after these wonderful lyrics have done their work. The domestic, social, erotic, and historic are all turned inside out; made subject to a fierce glare. This is a book of compelling estrangements. It is also a very fine first collection.
—Eavan Boland

The gorgeous poems in Deviants are intimate, grimy, and chillingly elusive. I admire the way Peter Kline, an expert formalist, undermines poetic form: he understands, the way Marianne Moore understood, the way Thom Gunn understood, the freedoms in propriety and deviation. Kline, ever the artful voyeur (“I go where everyone goes / and I go unseen”), in line after remarkable line, looks after his fortunate, unsuspecting reader with a dry eye and “a winterized grin.” Deviants is a striking, unsettling collection.
—Randall Mann

Additional Commentary

• Los Angeles Review of Books

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